34
Fifth century BC and beyond
SOCRATES: Love is the one thing I understand.
Plato, Symposium, 177d
EVERYONE KNEW THAT EROS WAS OFTEN an uninvited – but anticipated – guest at symposia. The rutting, squelching, hot, pounding business of physical love was much more evident in Athenian society than in our own. Vase-painters were obsessed with the activities, for example, of prostitutes – which they covered from every angle.
But whereas many evenings in fifth-century Athens ended (and sometimes began) with sex, Socrates seemed to be determined not to be a slave to his passions. He was ecstatic, sensuous, but not necessarily interested in the jiggery-pokery of sexual union. This abstinence is something we seem to find easier to imagine in the ecstasies of early Christians, not the pagans, but self-denial is certainly there in the character of Socrates as sold to us by Plato and Xenophon.
‘But to tell you the truth, gentlemen,’ he continued, ‘By Heaven! It does look to me – to speak confidentially – as if he had also kissed Cleinias; and there is nothing more terribly potent than this at kindling the fires of passion. For it is insatiable and holds out seductive hopes. For this reason I maintain that one who intends to possess the power of self-control must refrain from kissing those in the bloom of beauty.’1
‘Socrates,’ said Euthydemus, ‘I think you mean that he who is at the mercy of the bodily pleasures has no concern whatever with virtue in any form.’
‘Yes, Euthydemus; for how can an incontinent man be any better than the dullest beast? How can he who fails to consider the things that matter most, and strives by every means to do the things that are most pleasant, be better than the stupidest of creatures? No, only the self-controlled have power to consider the things that matter most, and, sorting them out after their kind, by word and deed alike to prefer the good and reject the evil.’2
A number of the vases depicting the imaginative, adventurous business of symposiast sex are now squirrelled away in locked rooms and cabinets in museums around the world: the Secretum at the British Museum, the Gabinetta Secreta in the Naples Archaeological Museum, a whole extension behind the Corinth Museum. The objects were stored here by nineteenth-century excavators who considered them offensive and ‘anti-Hellenic’. Those first-draft democrats of the fifth century would have been politely puzzled. What better way to express the health of your community than with sex? This society was extremely priapic. Herms (busts of the god Hermes) on street corners boasted fine erections, their penises carved onto the shafts of the columns that supported them. Girls on vases take it in every orifice. Athenian sex seems to have been gymnastic and athletic – in the Greek sense of the words – a great deal of flesh on show and all very athlon (contest-driven), all aiming for much satisfaction, high prizes. The Gabinetta Secreta and the Secretum are packed because the Greeks cheerfully filled their own lives with so much erotica.
But despite Socrates’ undoubted belief in the power of love, tribadic, gasping, physical love for its own sake was not for him.3 In Xenophon’s Symposium a slave-boy and slave-girl tenderly re-enact Psyche’s seduction by Eros. All in the room are stimulated to go home and make love to their wives. Socrates goes for a walk.
[SOCRATES:] Of course, you don’t suppose that lust provokes men to beget children when the streets and stews are full of means to satisfy the sexual urge …4
Instead he suggests that love means more than a moment in the sack. That real love makes you richer:
SOCRATES: The man who is attracted only by his beloved’s appearance is like one who has rented a farm; his aim is not to increase its value but to gain from it as much of a harvest as he can for himself. On the other hand, the man whose goal is friendship is more like one possessing a farm of his own.5
The stories that Socrates shares around the drinking couches of the symposia are not stories of sex, but stories of love. Ta erotika in his book means ‘the good things’ or ‘what leads us to the good things and good spiritedness’. And the philosopher does not pull his punches. He criticises one of the most powerful men of the day – a man who will then go on to bring civil war and tyranny back to Athens – for being obsessed with plain, burning, fluid-exchange sex. Critias was the name of this influential, reactionary, oligarchic individual.6 A relation of Plato and an aspiring tragedian with a darkly tragic bent, he moved in Socrates’ circle. Critias was hot for a younger man called Euthydemus. Socrates did not approve.
Critias seems to have the feelings of a pig: he can no more keep away from Euthydemus than pigs can help rubbing themselves against stones.7
Critias was furious. After the event he tried to gag Socrates, to stop him talking to anyone under thirty. Critias despised the self-righteous philosopher.8 This tells us as much about Socrates as it does about Critias. Often criticised by modern authors for being more than a little reactionary and ‘educating’ some of the most oppressive oligarchs of the day, this spat over Euthydemus exemplifies that in fact Socrates was troubled by Critias and his crowd. Just because the philosopher drank with them and they listened to him did not make him their role-model; we should never confuse a catholic taste in friends and acquaintances with evidence of indoctrination or sectarian cliquery.
Socrates was perfectly at ease in the symposia, but in the minds of others he sits there a little uncomfortably. He was not after all an aristocrat – and neither the democrats nor the oligarchs of the city would forget that he had broken convention by dining late into the night with the great and the good.
The philosopher was perhaps that troubling mix: a demotic highflyer. The Athenians cherished those who were ‘first in wealth and breeding’. They believed the beautiful kaloi k’agathoi were fit to rule. Socrates was not quite fully the ascetic, not fully the democrat, not fully the oligarch – and he was ubiquitous. A few years from now, when Athens has suffered so much and yet Socrates still swaggers through the Agora with his infuriating sense of purpose and his beatific attitude, perhaps he was just too vexatious, exasperating; a gadfly that needed swatting. Already we know from the plays of Aristophanes that the philosopher was beginning to rub his fellow citizens up the wrong way. And there is another, sadder possibility. Perhaps towards the end of the fifth century BCAthens was simply tired of him. The conversations about Socrates, once excited, indulgent, were now tetchy, damning. Those who have an extended stretch in the saddle are often wearied of; as time passes the tallest poppies are frequently cut down.
And Socrates should perhaps have chosen a little more carefully the men he decided to insult, thought twice before taking on and cutting down to size a character such as Critias, one of the high-flyers of the day.
One street proverb from the period should have sounded a warning bell in Socrates’ ears:
I hate a drinking companion with a memory.9